Our House

Judy of the woods do-it-yourself desk chair.

I occasionally do mad spates of research.  This morning I was trying to find a comfortable and supportive desk chair solution.  I spend hours at a time sitting at my desk and finding a chair that supports me properly is proving to be difficult.   That’s not the reason for this post.

In looking at desk chair images, I ran across the lovely image to the left.  This sort of thing makes me smile.  It’s an excellent example of someone thinking outside the box!

Judy’s chair struck a chord.  My current desk chair is being held in a relatively comfortable position by a length of cord, a cargo strap and a length of mountain tape (1″ wide flat nylon tube).  I’m not perfectly comfortable, the chair is still tipped a bit too far back, but I am *more* comfortable than I was before the cord, cargo strap and length of mountain tape.

The moral of this tale is, when we can get beyond vanity to cost effective function, we truly have come to the point where we can be thrifty and self-sufficient.  Judy of the woods looks to be a sister of my heart.  Check out her blog.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

Rocket mass heater workshop

I attended a rocket mass heater workshop last weekend.  It was fun and educational.  Seeing all the young people who want to live “green” was amusing!  Imagine them wanting to do the things I did growing up . . . living with wood heat, slaughtering their own meat, raising their own vegetables . . . really cute in a retro kind of way.  We did it growing up because we had to to survive.  These people are making it a life-style choice.  More power to ‘em.  I like raising my own veges, I like heating with wood.  I am drawing the line at going back to slaughtering my own food.  In my early years I had enough of that to last me a lifetime.  It’s enough to know I have the knowledge.  I can milk a cow, skin a deer, cut up pig, chicken, turkey and beef.  I have wrapped enough meat for the freezer.  At this point in my life, as long as I can comfortably afford to purchase my meat in tidy plastic wrapped packages at the local grocers, I’ll stick with that method of supplying my protein.